CS Departments

Miscellaneous

Web-based Applications

I've built web-based applications using a number of technologies
including PHP (with Wordpress and without), Java (servlets, JSP),
ASP.Net, and even python. The technologies I use to help my
development include JQuery, JQueryUI, Bootstrap/Twitter, Firebug,
Chrome, as well as several homespun tools that are custom-built for
the process.

Plains
Justice is a local public-interest non-profit law firm that
specializes in energy and environmental issues. This site was my
first foray into using Wordpress as a CMS at the root of a
web-app, so the "application" side of the website is quite thin.

Cognitive Media
is a flash-games website based on the idea that your brain can be
exercised, and this exercise can be ordinary flash-based games
instead of custom-built applications. The site categorizes
standard flash games by the kinds of cognitive simulation the game
provides, and then tracks your "exercise" as you play.

The site itself was custom built from the ground up using
ASP.NET and JQuery. Most of the custom coding was done in
C#.

CoalDiver
is a mostly volunteer effort to collect all information possible
about coal mining in the United States. While there is a huge
amount of information out there at various federal, state and
local websites, as well as in the news and on blogs, it can be
very difficult to track down information unless you're an expert
on the different websites

CoalDiver is built using a huge number of technologies. At its
core is WordPress with the Pods plugin. Each piece of information
on the website is a WP article tagged with a list of the WP pages
that it refers to. Pods enables the WP pages to be built
dynamically through crossreferencing available articles. The
website also uses
Scribd to store all of the
documents, and flickr to
store all the photos. Both documents and photos are pulled into
WP pages using the respective APIs.

You know we're constantly taking. We don't make most of the
food we eat, we don't grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other
people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use
a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives
building. I mean we're constantly taking things. It's a
wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into
the pool of human experience and knowledge. -- Steve Jobs,
Rolling Stone, November 1983.